Central Street (Zhongyang Street)

About this place

Harbin's best-known street, a cobbled pedestrian street 1,450 metres long running from the heart of Daoli district to the bank of the Songhua River; it is often described as Asia's longest pedestrian street, and in 1997 it became mainland China's first commercial pedestrian street. The street was laid out in 1898 with the Chinese Eastern Railway built by Russia; it was first called «Chinese Street» because it was set aside for Chinese residents, was renamed Central Street in 1928, and is paved with some 870,000 granite blocks shaped like loaves of bread. It is lined with early twentieth-century European buildings in Renaissance, Baroque, Art Nouveau and eclectic styles, built by Russian, Jewish and Chinese merchants when Harbin was a cosmopolitan city nicknamed «the Little Paris of the East»; today they hold shops, cafés and Russian-style restaurants. The street is free and always open; it is loveliest in the evening when the façades are lit, and in winter ice sculptures line it, per visitor guides. Harbin's famous red sausage is pork, and halal restaurants are easier to find around the Daowai Mosque in the old quarter.